Comparison of (OSM) routing-engines – Reloaded

by Pascal Neis - Published: July 19th, 2011

Maybe some of you remember that I conducted a comparison analysis between three OpenStreetMap (OSM) routing engine APIs (CloudMade, MapQuest Open and OSRM) and G**gle Maps API last week. You can find the results in my blog post here. As I mentioned in the article, I wanted to try to do a second analysis with more routing engines.

Thus, I added Bing Maps and two OSM engines (YourNavigation/YOURS and Routino/Roadeeno) to the comparison. All services have a continental coverage with the exception of OSRM. The following table shows an overview of (1) the request-response time of the service, (2) the calculated distance for the test-route and (3) the file size of the service response:

As you can see in the following diagram does the OSM routing engine (OSRM) give the fastest results. A little bit strange is that the Routino/Roadeeno service returns no valid route responses for requests which are longer than 600 km.

The same diagram in a more detailed view:

The routing engines have different ping times (round-trip time). Almost all services have a round-trip time off about 25 ms. You can see the times for each engine in the following diagram:

If you take those ping times into account and use a logarithmic transformation, the result look as shown below:

The above diagram shows in a quite impressive way the results of this comparison that allow the following conclusions: OSRM (OSM) shows the fastest results followed by G**gle Maps (Tele Atlas). Bing (Navteq), MapQuest (OSM) and CloudMade (OSM) are nearly equal in most cases. YOURS (OSM) and Routino (OSM) seem not to be the right choices at least for long route calculations (>600km). Maybe a second comparison with several routes between 10 and 500 km could be an enhancement?

Are the queries run with points ala from:latitude,longitude or are they via pure text from:berlin? If via pure text then it would explain the big differences even for short length path like potsdam-berlin. As different providers define a different center of every city (as you can e.g. try out for nominatim vs. google for Berlin).